The Neighborhood News Online

Pet Pause

What Happened to Michael VIck's Pit Bulls?

Details: Category: Animal Issues and Pets; Published on Friday, 13 August 2010 17:23; Written by Jim Gorant

The little black-and-white dog knocked into furniture and hid things in his crate. He couldn’t go up or down stairs, didn’t know how to climb onto a couch. Flushing toilets and clanging pots sent him running from the room. He wasn’t a bad dog—he simply didn’t know any better; he’d never lived in a house. His lack of social grace earned him the name Jonny Rotten. “He was a caveman,” says Cris Cohen, a Burlingame, Calif., car-dealership manager who provided Jonny with a foster home. “He had no manners.”

That was understandable. Jonny was one of 51 pit bulls seized in April 2007 from Bad Newz Kennels, the Smithfield, Va., dogfighting ring run by Michael Vick, then quarterback of the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons. Although too young to have been a fighter, Jonny probably had his mettle tested a few times, and like most of the other Bad Newz dogs, he’d spent his entire life either locked up in a pen or chained to a rotating axle in the woods, with little or no positive interaction with people or other dogs.